A Daringly Dark 'Flight'

I’m not certain when the feeling set in for me, but at some point during the Flight
screening I attended, I was overcome with the sense of observing the
dark days of Stevie Ray Vaughan, the virtuoso Texas guitarist who died
in the early 1990s after years of working as a sideman (most notably
with David Bowie on his 1980s classic Let’s Dance) and taking
center stage with his own band. Vaughan’s fiery flights of fancy on his
ax are legendary among guitar aficionados, but there are just as many
tales of his epic bouts with drug and alcohol addiction. Vaughan was
definitely not alone in this predilection. Musicians are well-documented
substance abusers, whether to fuel creative musings or to keep some
fragile grip on sanity.

Yet, it was Vaughan’s story that
resonated with me as I watched Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) wake up
one fateful morning and stare at the naked butt of one of his flight
attendants before draining the remnants of a beer and snorting a line of
cocaine as part of his pre-flight ritual. The ease of this routine cues
audiences in to this as a sad and dangerous reality for Whip. Not only
is he a hound for booze and women, but he’s also found that he can
function in this state. And function quite well, in fact.

And so, as that morning progresses, the
everyday touchstones are there. Whip emerges clean-shaven, eyes
protected behind his aviator shades, his cool, confident stride a
graceful dance along the edge or the tightrope that only we can see and
appreciate. He takes his coffee black with lots of sugar and straps in
next to a young co-pilot who intuits that there’s something slightly
off-kilter about the man in charge.

Why push the plane so hard, so fast? We
feel the impending doom during takeoff and not just because we as an
audience know this is Robert Zemeckis, the director who shook us to our
cores with another catastrophic plane crash in Castaway, leaving Tom Hanks stranded alone on an island so long he ended up bonding with a volleyball.

But the deck is stacked here with what
we’ve seen of Whip. He gets through the takeoff and then goes out to
calmly address the passengers, while strategically shielding himself
from view as he pours two small bottles of vodka into a container of
orange juice with practiced precision. Before the eventual tragic drama
kicks in, Whip is asleep in the cockpit, but he awakens as cool as cool
can be as the situation hits full-crisis mode. He not only reacts, he
takes aggressive action that would border on the truly reckless if
evaluated under a more controlled circumstance.

In those key moments, Whip is Vaughan
onstage, blisteringly gliding up and down the Blues scales in pursuit of
a path only he can see and hear. Being high, flying that high above it
all, must grant a sense of peace beyond fear or passion. And this must
be the place that Whip (and Vaughan and any other addict) longs to be
all the time, in this fleeting moment.

In Flight, Whip’s story is
paralleled by that of an addict named Nicole (Kelly Reilly) who
overdoses right before Whip’s plane glides by before its crash. Whip
encounters Nicole later, in the hospital, each of them seeking a moment
of solace as they enjoy a smoke. They bond and we observe the merging of
these two souls even as they move in opposite directions. Nicole sobers
up, despite the difficulty of refusing to succumb to the temptation to
chase that illusive high. Whip goes in the other direction as the crash
investigation heads toward its inevitable findings regarding his state
of inebriation and another crash looms.

Select musical choices on the soundtrack
are a bit too on-the-nose, but they are used to drill home points that
Zemeckis wisely refuses to tell us. Flight is all about simply
sitting back and watching one man and the choices he makes each step of
the way. We see him for what he is and it is also fascinating to note
that the story never looks back too far or too long for explanations or
root causes of his condition. There’s no need to rationalize Whip’s
drinking away. He is an alcoholic because he drinks, plain and simple,
taking (and living) life, as Vaughan sang toward the end, by the drop.
(R) Grade: A-